The peaceful Muslim majority

is irrelevant.

My brother-in-law, a splendid fellow, sent an email containing the text of this article, for which I provide the original. (All those graduate degrees are not going to waste!)

Blogger Paul E Marek makes the very salient point that seemingly peaceful or disinterested or silent or distracted majorities are led. And it's therefore the leadership that is important. This seems especially true to me about Muslims, who are collectivists without a tradition of individualism.

The picture on his site shows a girl with a sign proclaiming that it is not ok to "bash" Muslims. He rightly responds that she misses the point. I would go further and say that suspicion of Muslims is rational and ethical and that it is the job of Muslims not to whine and play the victim, but to prove, show, demonstrate and assure the rest of us that they can be trusted as members of our Western national communities.

It's not very significant to say that most Muslims are not jihadis. What is significant is that the vast majority of terrorists in the world are Muslims. And the leadership of Muslim communities...?

PS. ShrinkWrapped makes a similar point, suggesting a likeness between Good Muslims and Good Germans.

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